I wrench my arm from his grasp and walk toward the elevators.
“Man,” Shauna says. “That is a bad day.”
“Yeah.”
She and I are sitting next to the chasm with our feet over the edge. I rest my head against the bars of the metal barrier that’s keeping us from falling to our deaths, and feel the spray of water against my ankles as one of the larger waves hits a wall.
I told her about my departure from leadership training, and Eric’s threat, but I didn’t tell her about my mother. How do you tell someone that your mother came back from the dead?
All my life, someone has been trying to control me. Marcus was the tyrant of our house, and nothing happened without his permission. And then Max wanted to recruit me as his Dauntless yes-man. And even my mother had a plan for me, for me to join up with her when I reached a certain age to work against the faction system that she has a vendetta against, for whatever reason. And just when I thought that I had escaped control altogether, Eric swooped in to remind me that if he became a Dauntless leader, he would be watching me.
All I have, I realize, are the small moments of rebellion I’m able to manage, just like when I was in Abnegation, collecting objects I found on the street. The tattoo that Tori is drawing on my back, the one that might declare me to be Divergent, is one of those moments. I’ll have to keep looking for more of them, more brief moments of freedom in a world that refuses to allow it.
“Where’s Zeke?” I say.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t wanted to hang out with him much recently.”
I look sideways at her. “You could just tell him that you like him, you know. I honestly don’t think he has a clue.”
“That’s obvious,” she says, snorting. “But what if this is what he wants—to just bounce around from girl to girl for a while? I don’t want to be one of those girls he bounces to.”
“I seriously doubt you would be,” I say, “but fair enough.”
We sit quietly for a few seconds, both of us staring down at the raging water below.
“You’ll be a good instructor,” she says. “You were really good at teaching me.”
“Thanks.”
“There you are,” Zeke says from behind us. He’s carrying a large bottle full of some kind of brown liquid, holding it by the neck. “Come on. I found something.”
Shauna and I look at each other and shrug, then follow him to the doors on the other side of the Pit, the ones we first went through after jumping into the net. But instead of leading us toward the net, he takes us through another door—the lock is taped down with duct tape—and down a pitch-black corridor and a flight of stairs.
“Should be coming up—ouch!”
“Sorry, I didn’t know you were stopping,” Shauna says.
“Hold on, almost got it—”
He opens a door, letting faint light in so we can see where we are. We’re on the other side of the chasm, several feet above the water. Above us, the Pit seems to go on forever, and the people milling around near the railing are small and dark, impossible to distinguish from this distance.
I laugh. Zeke just led us into another small moment of rebellion, probably without meaning to.
“How did you find this place?” Shauna says with obvious wonder as she jumps down onto one of the lower rocks. Now that I’m here, I see a path that would carry us up and across the wall, if we wanted to walk to the other side of the chasm.
“That girl Maria,” Zeke says. “Her mom works in chasm maintenance. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but apparently there is.”
“You still seeing her?” Shauna asks, trying to be casual.
“Nah,” Zeke says. “Every time I was with her I just kept getting the itch to be with friends instead. That’s not a good sign, right?”
“No,” Shauna agrees, and she seems more cheerful than before.
I lower myself more carefully onto the rock Shauna is standing on. Zeke sits next to her, opening his bottle and passing it around.
“I heard you’re out of the running,” Zeke says when he passes it to me. “Thought you might need a drink.”
“Yeah,” I say, and then I take a swig.
“Consider this act of public drunkenness a big—” He makes an obscene gesture toward the glass ceiling above the Pit. “You know, to Max and Eric.”
And Evelyn, I think, as I take another swallow.
“I’ll be working in the control room when I’m not training initiates,” I say.
“Awesome,” Zeke says. “It’ll be good to have a friend in there. Right now no one talks to me.”
“Sounds like me in my old faction,” I say with a laugh. “Imagine an entire lunch period in which no one even looks at you.”
“Ouch,” Zeke says. “Well, I bet you’re glad to be here now, then.”
I take the bottle from him again, drink another mouthful of stinging, burning alcohol, and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yeah,” I say. “I am.”
If the factions are deteriorating, as my mother would have me believe, this is not a bad place to watch them fall apart. At least here I have friends to keep me company while it happens.
It’s just after dark, and I have my hood up to hide my face as I run through the factionless area of the city, right by the border it shares with the Abnegation sector. I had to go to the school to get my bearings, but now I remember where I am, and where I ran, that day that I barged into a factionless warehouse in search of a dying ember.